3 July 2007

Tennessee has a new law requiring age verification on
allpurchases
of beer.
Nominally, this is an attempt
to prevent underage drinking. I'll leave to others to discuss
whether or not it's likely to be effective, or why the law applies
only to beer and not to wine or hard liquor. (I was tempted to muse
on the effects of generalizing this idea on a famous local product —
Jack Daniels Tennessee whisky — but to do that properly I'd
have to link to their web site, and that is allegedly difficult.
It seems that Jack Daniels' has a "Linking Agreement". Is that
enforceable? I may comment on that another time.)

There is, however, a privacy issue. Note this portion of the
cited article:

Richard Rollins, who owns a convenience store in Nashville,
is already using a computerized scanner to check everyones
drivers licenses when they buy beer. "We just say were
trying to keep our beer permit, and this is the safest
way," Rollins said.

But it has stopped Jeff Campbell from shopping at Rollins
market.

"I dont mind them asking for my ID, but they dont need my
drivers license number," said Campbell, 43. "Im just buying
a six-pack. All they need to know is how old I am."

Rollins said scanning licenses has proved beneficial in
other ways, such as catching criminals.

When one customer tried to make a purchase using a counterfeit
bill, Rollins said police were able to track him down
because the receipt from the scanner showed his name and
license number _ and his address.

That's right — stores and bars can and do record various
personal details from your driver's license. The purpose of the
check is to prove your age; the alleged purpose of the scanner is to
detect counterfeit licenses. The trouble is that it does more,
and most people don't realize that.

Privacy has been
defined
as "the right of an entity (normally a person),
acting in its own behalf, to determine the degree to which it will
interact with its environment, including the degree to which the entity is
willing to share information about itself with others." Many
uses of the scanners are intended to collect customer information;
see, for example,
CardVisor II,
IdVisor, and more that
I didn't find in two minutes of searching the net.

The privacy threat isn't new. However, this new law is likely
to increase the usage of such scanners, and with that the threat to
privacy will increase.